One of the world’s leading suppliers of solar PV trackers is targeting sales volumes of approximately 15MW per week of the new battery solution it has paired with its products.
NEXTracker, which according to GTM Research held 30% of the global PV tracker market as of April this year and was sold to Flextronics for US$330 million in 2015, recently launched its partnership with Avalon Battery, a flow battery maker from Oakland, California.
The solution, NX Fusion and NX Fusion Plus, comes pre-wired and pre-assembled, designed to serve as its “own independent renewable energy power plant,” according to the company. The bundles include the NX Horizon tracker, capable of rotating PV modules up to 120 degrees, DC wiring, string inverters, PV modules, UPS, piers and tracker monitoring and control system.
While many other companies are focusing on lithium-ion batteries, NEXTracker was persuaded to go with Avalon Battery’s flow technology after Avalon responded strongly to a novel request for proposal from the tracker specialist. NEXtracker director of sales for the storage solution, Ralph Fallant, told Energy-Storage.News at Intersolar Europe that it was a good fit overall.
“Our CTO Alex Au and one of our consultants, Josh Wiener, they produced an RFP called “decapitate the duck”. They were looking specifically for the best battery technology to be deployed with our type of product, to deal with the duck curve [the lack of overlap between peak solar production and peak energy consumption famously experienced in California],” Fallant said.
“They released a load profile that had two small discharges and one very deep discharge and that was the model people were supposed to compete against.”
As well as being the best entrant in that impromptu competition, the Avalon battery met other criteria that NEXtracker sought.
“What we found was a form factor that fits very well with our product. Our typical row is about 30kW, this is a 25kWh battery and it’ll be paired with a three-port Ideal Power inverter,” Fallant said.
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